Editorial

Standards

One of the aims of ALT is to promote good practice in the use of learning technology within
higher education. Few would not subscribe to this aim, but proclaiming it without a full
awareness of the problems it entails is of the same order as proclaiming one's commitment to
Peace without further comment. Except for the absolute pacifist, being against war does not
mean being against it at any price, but rather being committed to ensuring circumstances in
which war will not occur. So it is with good practice in educational technology, which can be
achieved only if circumstances are propitious. Such circumstances include sufficient funds,
and a willingness in both teacher and learner to accept in whole or in part a technological
route — good practice is unlikely to be achieved if technology has been incorporated into the
curriculum merely in order to ensure that funds already spent do not appear to have been
wasted. Above all, in my view, good practice assumes that users of learning technology are
able to concentrate on learning without (necessarily) thinking about the technology, since if
the technology cannot be made to work transparently, actual practice will at best lag behind
ideal practice, and at worst be abandoned altogether. Impatience is a barrier to learning, and
particularly if it is the result of struggling with the learning tools themselves. If the teacher or
learner is constantly having to tweak the technology, or ending up with a half-baked
implementation because the setting-up process has proven too difficult, the learning tool may
well be left to gather dust.

Fax has rapidly become almost the staff of life in both commercial and educational
institutions because it is on the whole reliable, and conforms to a single standard. Generally
speaking, however, leading-edge technology is unreliable and unfriendly. When television sets
were first seen in homes, they required constant adjustment and professional attention, and the
television repair business boomed. Today, repairing television sets is a cottage industry, and
not only because replacement may be less expensive than repair, but also because modern sets
are technologically robust. What is more, in good measure television is now universally
popular because the viewer knows that once a set has been bought, he or she merely has to
plug in an aerial, tune in the stations, and all will work as expected. Television sets would be
less numerous than they are if at each replacement the viewer had to go through a complex
routine to make the aerial 'handshake' with the new set, only to find that five times out of ten
this task could not be accomplished without expert assistance, and that three times out of the
remaining five it could not be accomplished at all.

This is, unfortunately, much the case with interactive-multimedia technology. While
word-processing is now at a stage where the user can be confident that the software and

%ardware will work well together, interactive applications involving images and sound appear
to-be recipes for frustration. The de facto standard in sound cards for IBM-compatibles, for
example, is Westpoint Creative's SoundBlaster, which forms part of that de jure standard
known as MPC (Multimedia PC). An MPC system, according to those who defined the
standard, is an IBM or IBM-compatible PC with a specified minimum central processor and
graphics card, specified minimum amounts of internal memory and physical storage space, a
CD-ROM drive and a SoundBlaster or SoundBlaster-compatible sound card. Given this agreed
specification, a user might imagine that an application involving sound, developed for the
MPC standard, would run perfectly on any MPC system. Matters are not that simple.

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ALT-J VOLUME 1 NUMBER I

Take a PC which conforms to the MPC standard, though not actually marked MPC (there are
many such systems in use, while 'genuine' MPCs are rare). Contact the producer or
distributor of a commercial product intended for use on an MPC system and, before paying
for it, ask for a copper-bottomed guarantee that it will work as it should, first time and
without professional help with the installation. If the producer is honest, you are likely to be
told that no such guarantees can be given, that it may well come down to some trial and error,
and that when all the dust has cleared there is still a significant chance that the product may
not work at all. Such was the recent experience of a colleague of mine who was told by the
distributors of a well-known American interactive-learning product that they could not
guarantee first-time success, in particular with the audio element of the product, because their
own technical staff had themselves spent several frustrating hours installing it on a genuinely
marked MPC. First, they had had to change the sound card since it had turned out to be faulty
only when this particular software product had been tried with it. Then time had been spent
setting the system parameters so that the PC's internal memory was being handled properly,
and discovering the right interrupts. How could they be sure, they argued with commendable
frankness, that the product would run properly on a PC system which had been built up over a
period of time, whatever standard such a system now supposedly conformed to? Indeed, when
my colleague went ahead and bought the product on a sale-or-return basis, it would not run.
And, not surprisingly, the installation manual was peppered with pass-the-buck advice such
as: 'If you encounter problems, consult your sound card manual' - enough to make a beginner
give up before beginning. It took many telephone calls and two visits from the suppliers to
adjust everything so that the controller software could be loaded and run. The product was
then tested on some students. It crashed after less than 15 minutes, displaying that Windows
message which offers as little hope as Dante's gates of hell: the one that informs you of an
unrecoverable error and impending termination of the application (once you have clicked on
OK - Microsoft at least has a sense of irony). My colleague's final comment on the episode
was that she would wait until the technology had matured.

The world of the Apple Macintosh suffers less from problems of standards than that of the
PC, which is no doubt partly why some educational institutions have opted for it. But there is
little chance that the Macintosh or any other non-IBM system will oust the PC from its firm
foothold in the majority of higher-educational establishments. Many interactive-multimedia
learning tools will thus have to struggle for a while to establish themselves on a platform
which was not originally designed to handle them, and which has spawned innumerable
deviations from its so-called standard - in the area of graphics alone, there are more than 30
different PC image formats.

Yet despite all this - indeed, because of it - those of us who believe in the future of
computer-based learning technology (and not merely because pressure of student numbers
might make it inevitable) need not simply wait for a real standard to emerge out of commerce
or entertainment in the way such standards have emerged in the past. On the contrary,
academics can be a major force in determining an accepted standard if they are willing to
keep an open mind (in other words, to eschew the Not-Invented-Here and the even more
childish My-System-Is-Better-Than-Yours syndromes), to co-operate in forming an upgradable
standard which everyone can and will accept, and then to promote it by showing what it can
achieve. That will be a good start for the good practice we in A L T wish to foster.

Gabriel Jacobs

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